Senilità Reading Order

Senilità (As a Man Grows Older, 1898) by Italo Svevo is the second and most underread of his three novels — the one that Graham Greene called 'a masterpiece' and that many Svevo scholars consider nearly the equal of La Coscienza di Zeno in its precision of psychological observation. Emilio Brentani is a minor writer in Trieste who has produced one forgotten novel and now works as an insurance clerk while imagining himself a man of literary distinction. When he begins an affair with Angiolina, a working-class woman of frank sexuality and frank dishonesty, he cannot see her at all — he idealizes her into a literary construction ('Ange', his angel) even as she lies to him with increasing brazenness. Meanwhile his sister Amalia, who has arranged her whole life around caring for Emilio, falls silently and hopelessly in love with their bohemian artist friend Balli, a love that will kill her. The title — usually translated as 'As a Man Grows Older' — is the key: 'senilità' does not mean old age but a particular premature exhaustion of the will, a failure of the capacity for full engagement with life that afflicts Emilio not at sixty but at thirty-five. The novel was ignored on publication in 1898, and Svevo would not publish again for twenty-five years. When Joyce brought Svevo to French attention in the 1920s, Senilità was rediscovered and recognised for what it is: one of the finest psychological novels of the pre-war period.